Have beer with Caddie, a gem of Aussie cinema

Caddie is among the unheralded gems of the then-nascent New Australian Cinema movement.

Helen Morse and Jack Thompson in Caddie.

Mid-1970s Balmain plays itself proudly in director Donald Crombie’s 1976 Depression-era drama Caddie (Sunday, 11.50pm, ABC). After leaving her husband with two young kids in tow, the title character (played by Helen Morse, who won the AFI’s best actress award for her work) becomes a barmaid in a working-class pub to make ends meet.

The bulk of the location interiors were filmed at the old Kent Hotel, which is now a private residence, while some other shots were taken at the Sir William Wallace Hotel, which still trades today.

Nostalgia value aside, Caddie is among the unheralded gems of the then-nascent New Australian Cinema movement. Jacki Weaver’s in it, as well.

Still on the peninsula, one of the most high-profile current exports of the region is actress Rose Byrne.

And one of her best recent performances is as one-half of a young marriage in writer-director Dan Mazer’s sprightly 2013 British romantic comedy I Give It a Year (Saturday, 8.30pm, 7Two).

Mazer, who co-wrote some of Sacha Baron Cohen’s more anarchic films, Borat and Bruno, proves adept at this much different genre in his creation of believable, relatable characters finding their footing in contemporary London.

Interestingly, Byrne’s character’s husband is played by up-and-coming actor Rafe Spall, whose father, Timothy (see the pay-TV pick of the week), is a regular in Mike Leigh’s films.

Another far more melancholy film about time is writer-director Sarah Watt’s last film, the touching 2009 drama My Year without Sex (Saturday, 1.20am, SBS Two).

Envisioned as the middle film of a trilogy about the effects of illness on relationships (following 2005’s Look Both Ways), it stars Sacha Horler as a woman advised against intimacy in the wake of a brain aneurysm.

This was the last movie Watt made before succumbing to breast and bone cancer in 2001. Her legacy is one of thoughtful, gently provocative yet profoundly humanistic interpersonal drama, and her distinctive voice will be missed.

Gillian Armstrong’s new documentary on Australian-born Hollywood fashion designer Orry-Kelly (nee Orry George Kelly) may still be playing in a cinema near-ish you, but a splendid example of his work, and a film for which he won the Academy Award for best costume design, is Billy Wilder’s much-loved 1959 comedy Some Like it Hot (Monday, 1.25am, ABC).

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are the 1920s jazz musicians forced to cross-dress for an all-girl band to avoid vengeful gangsters, while Marilyn Monroe, in the designer’s flattering and racy clothes, is their confused love interest.

Some Like it Hot (PG) 4 stars

Monday, 1.25am, ABC

My Year without Sex (M) 3.5 stars

Saturday, 1.20am, SBS Two

Caddie (M) 3.5 stars

Sunday, 11.50pm, ABC